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Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

mashable.com

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Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#21

Post by nmeofthestate »

ioulian wrote: post #16
nmeofthestate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't think this is "one battery" - is a warehouse full of large pizzas the biggest pizza in the world?

Isn't a battery just a name for the collection of battery cells? Tesla's (the car) battery is composed from a lot of units that can store electricity. Some RC batteries are just different cells/smaller batteries that are combined together in a nice package. I think even the batteries in cell phones are composed from different components (some of which doesn't even store energy).

Yeah this occurred to me after posting that pedantry. You're right. Even consumer batteries can have multiple cells.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#22

Post by adaml_623 »

jakecodes wrote: post #5

I am not a battery expert by any means. But the article says: > with 100 megawatts of capacity. Isn't megawatts the measurement of power? Wouldn't Watt Hours be the measurement for capacity? Sometimes people use Apmere Hours also. Like the Chevy Bolt has 60 kWh of capacity.

That's a great point and the answer is that it has storage capacity measured in Watt Hours and it has a peak power supply capacity measured in Watts. Other comments have the details :-)

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#23

Post by fooker »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #12
bamboozled wrote: post #9

I'm Nitpicking, but it's a silly title. It should at least read, like "Elon Musk and his team built the biggest battery in the world".

I also don't think this is "one battery" - is a warehouse full of large pizzas the biggest pizza in the world?

You can connect batteries to build what is effectively a bigger battery. Connecting pizzas, not very scalable.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#24

Post by azeirah »

_yewy wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media? The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla. I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/J…

Elon Musk is a brand, it is only coincidental that he happens to be a real person as well.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#25

Post by edejong »

electricityUser wrote: post #8
nmeofthestate wrote: post #4

Not mentioned in the article - its capacity is 129 MWh. So, at full pelt it would output 100MW for an hour and 20 minutes... ish? Which I think is about 120 peoples' worth of power. (correction 1MW is not 1KW, so 120,000!) https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/tesla-powerpack-enable-larg...

I don't know what Australian electricity needs are, but we averaged 500 W over the last year in our 2-person household. This battery would be good for 10000 similar households for a day or 200000 households "for an hour and 20 minutes...ish".

Is that due to airco or electric heating? We have an average of 130W.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#26

Post by fu86 »

I am not sure about that (biggest battery in the world). This looks like a battery "pack" (an array of batteries connected in parallel/series). This looks like just a marketing thing to me, because there is nothing new or special about it. Just "the biggest".

Germany is also working on big batteries for years, but with a completely different strategy. A redox-flow battery with polymers and saline solution (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18909) Here is a recent german article about it (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/brine4power-so-fu...)

This kind of batteries will hold 700 MWh.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#27

Post by soneca »

_yewy wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media? The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla. I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/J…

> "Musk/Jobs/you name It"

Actually, I believe only those two receive such treatment. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and current Apple innovations are always attributed, correctly, to the companies.

I see this as the result of a conscious intention by both Jobs and Musk.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#28

Post by simonh »

_yewy wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media? The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla. I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/J…

To be fair though, if Tesla build say a giant electic powered jet airplane next year, it will happen because Elon Musk decides he wants an electric jet airplane, not because John Doe in the Tesla workshops is really good a welding.

Some people really do make that much of a difference. If none of the other people at SpaceX had existed in 2002 when Elon decided to build the company, so he'd had to hire all different people, there's a pretty good chance we'd still have reusable orbital booster rockets by now.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#29

Post by anovikov »

keenerd wrote: post #18
anovikov wrote: post #13

that's still pricey at almost $400 per kwh of capacity... or about $0.2 per kwh of storage, several times the grid prices.

edit: I too can mix up GW and MW.

I was assuming 3000 cycles at 60% depth of discharge, which is what typical modern Li-Ion battery does, and an equivalent of 1800 full cycles. 129MWH over 1800 cycles is 232GWh, which is for $50M = $0.215 per KWh.

Re: Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

#30

Post by simonh »

azeirah wrote: post #24
_yewy wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media? The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla. I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/J…

Elon Musk is a brand, it is only coincidental that he happens to be a real person as well.

So if I'd given you the Elon Musk brand 20 years ago and thrown the man in a Gulag, we'd still have Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets and solar roof tiles now?
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